Let's examine whether western Europe caused third world poverty, Eduardo Galeano's thesis in Las Venas Abiertas de America Latina . Here's how professional historians build a coherent argument: with a kind of double blind clinical trial in which we review different economic and social outcomes from states with the same or similar cultures, languages and religions. For example:
North and South Korea: Both colonized by Japan from 1910-45 with vastly different economic outcomes since the 1953 armistice.
India vs South Korea: same GDP per capita in 1961. Today India $2601, South Korea $33.4k (and NK's $654/year in 2021). In your view the British Raj is responsible for South Korea's performance of 13x India since 1961. Or the Japanese colonizers were far less exploitive (ask their comfort women).
East and West Germany from 1949-89: It's Trabi vs Mercedes. Nobody from the West was trying to escape to the East.
Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala ($2589-5358 GDP per capita) vs Costa Rica and Panama ($14.7 & $17.4k).
Serial defaulter hyperinflationary Venezuela ($3.64K), Argentina ($13.7k) vs Chile ($17.8k) and Italy ($36.8k). 75 years ago Argentina was the 7th richest nation in the world and Italy was a war ravaged basket case with mass emigration to Venezuela and Argentina. Now Italy's GDP per capita is nearly 3x Argentina's, 10x Venezuela's--and Argentina is ethnically and culturally half Italian.
Same religion and language with similar cultures. All colonized by Spain, subjected to multiple interventions by the US; the prototypical banana republics. Costa Rica and Panama are functioning constitutional democracies--however flawed. It's inconceivable that western wealth, interventions and colonization are responsible for such a huge difference in outcomes.
Estonia ($31.5k) vs Latvia ($25.3k): Both were out of the post-communist starting gate in the same position and occupied by the same USSR. Estonia is now 25% richer, better governed, less corrupt and an economy that will reach Finnish standards of living in a generation. What's your explanation? More Soviet exploitation in Latvia? Or differences in governance? The answer is obvious.
Pre-1979 Maoist China vs capitalist China governed by a CCP mafia since 1979. If you know of a Chinese who wants another Great Leap Forward type famine, tell me.
Milan vs Palermo, Barcelona vs Badajoz, California vs Appalachia, Vermont vs New Orleans: As Cavour said, they made Italy without stopping to make the Italians. You can find two different countries within the same national borders. Colin Woodard's American Nations explains how this works. Again, it's rule of law vs rule by law, the rules above the rulers or vice versa. If you think you'll get sustainability without western-style rule of law governing investment flows into a green transition in energy, agriculture, construction, auto, cement and steel production, you're dreaming.
Colonization in different form. Form matters.
The Baltics, Finland and all the other Warsaw Pact states are happy to live under the American empire's security umbrella. A distant bully who practices informal soft power empire through voluntary alliance networks is always better than a nearby bully stuck in a 19th century formal hard power empire model that wants to Russify every people it occupies. Only an idiot wouldn't prefer an empire that says "send lawyers, guns and money" to "send purges, deportations and Russifying genocide". Only a few senile Russian-imported babushki don't want Latvia in NATO. To see in Russia's land-based colonial empire built on five centuries of genocidal conquest of 100+ subjugated peoples an agent of anti-imperialism is beyond absurd. Here's how Russkiy Mir's uncodified white supremacist Jim Crow works:
https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/jailbreak-unlocking-russias-prison-of-nations-b506fa75e301
Being an apologist for a fossil-fueled Russian empire whose Wagner mining concessions in Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, the CAR and Sudan export Russia's mafia kleptocracy, as Scott Dunn does, won't help your Ghanaian or Ecuadorean friends. Your Ecuadorean friends won't prosper because you shut down my Galapagos, Ecuadorean client Ecoventura (In 2000 they paid for part of their photography and brochure order with our vacation in the Galapagos).
